We've gotten smug about medicine and the future. We are so so lucky. We can cure so damn many illnesses, we have so many tools to diagnose, to heal, to cure, to find conditions early. MRIs and CTs and PET scans, dozens of tests and analyses.

But dammit, there is so much we don't know. Look, I don't have kids. If I did, I would vaccinate them, for sure. It always seemed like and still seems like the right thing to do. I am not supporting parents who refuse to vaccinate their children. I think the reasons most of these parents offer are bogus and unfair to every child their kid comes nto contact with. Nothing new here, right?

Here's all I want to bring up. Medicine isn't all perfect. Medicine in the 21st century is on beyond what it was, say in the 19th century. We did a lot in the 20th century - my mother had spinal surgery and spent months in a body cast. I had spinal surgery and was walking the next day after the fusion. As one small example. Now, we map the human genome and might find where things go wonky, where one person is like this when almost everyone else is like that.

But what we don't know is huge. What we don't know still exists in great blobs out there and we lose sight of that. We still do not know many things. My sister spent years feeling like hell because no one diagnosed her celiac disease. Our mother had polio that left her spine so twisted that her rib cage crowded her lungs and she may never have known what it was like to take a deep breath. Our father was an alcoholic.

We have theories and we have the beginnings of some answers. But we don't know. So when parents argue about the dangers of vaccines, there are a lot of times that we need to listen. Maybe a tiny percentage of people react to something. Maybe it's the vaccine itself. I once had a skin rash that was so so so bad, so stubborn that my treating physician said I was reacting to the totally inert medium that the medicine came in - petroleum jelly. (Never had been allergic to it before). I have a bizarro food allergy. I was fortunate to figure it out after two horrible awful experiences. Recently, I was doubled over in pain when I mistakenly ingested that food again.

My mother, in the highest risk category for flu could not, for years, get a flu shot as she was seriously allergic to eggs. Now there is a vaccine that does not use egg as a medium. Well, yay.

There is a food product - I like their stuff - that claims "Nobody doesn't like...." their stuff. Oh, nonsense. There is no "nobody" there is no "everybody". Everybody doesn't like milk. They hate it because they hate it, they hate it because it gives them stomach pain, cramps, gas. There is no everyone here.

We don't know things. I was born in 1953 and I have a peculiar bone disease that has never been diagnosed, despite tests and tests, even after sending bone biopsy results all over the country. After my sister's doctor and mine charted all of our everythings, to find common ground. There was none. Not even Vitamin D. And all my test results were "within normal range."

Was it something I ate? Something my mother ingested? Something my father was given when he got sick once? My bizarro food allergy was not something that I knew as a child. I ate this food until I was in college - in the early 70s when I found out something was wrong. Was it something mom ate? Maybe. We will never know.

I do not have a diagnosis for my bone fracturing problem (PLEASE DO NOT SUGGEST WHAT IT MIGHT BE, OKAY? I've worked on this for years.) One of my best friends has a daughter with severe autism. I know folks with children who live with epilepsy, with cystic fibrosis. I know people with extremely nasty diabetes, seizure disorders, cancer. We don't know.

We know a lot but we don't know everything. And medicine has taken on the aura of magic for a lot of us. Me too. It was very hard to realize that no one knew what the hell caused me to experience at least a dozen pelvic and hip fractures.

Sometimes not knowing is ignorance. Some times, however, not knowing is not knowing and we have a really hard time with that situation here in the future. I "believe" in science. I also know that science lets us down at times, when we think of it as magical.